Brain Ooze

I am in Hong Kong now for a week. I am here alone. I didn’t plan for this trip and it was a rather last minute arrangement. Othere than knowing that temple street is just across the corner and starbucks is around the other corner, I am confined to travelling between the hotel and conference center.

But having arrived at Hong Kong a few hours ago, I began to have this strange feeling. So it is easier to compartmentalize all that is going on and all that is Hong Kong.

1. Calculators. I bought a ticket from a young chap for the airport train to town. He clearly understand English, so do I. But when telling me the price of the ticket, he just has to punch in the number on the calculator and show it to me. It is like they call numbers differently from everwhere else.

2. Hong Kong, looks like the series. Feels like in the mini series.. ooh, those are filmed here!

3. There are a lot of indonesians, filipinos etc. It is like a reverse of UK. The majority of people are Chinese but sprinkled around are indonesians, filipinos and I am sure there are many malaysians here too.

4. Feels like UK here. apprently it DOES get cold here. How come I don’t see people in winter clothes in TVB miniseries.

5. There are people here that looks like hong kong mafia sidekick. My hotel concierge for one. They dress in leather jackets that has many zippered pockets with dark jeans. When they asked me to go level 2, feels like and order.

6. Hong Kong, at least where I stay in Nathan Road.. is a HUGE petaling street.

7. What’s with the bambo scafolding?

Will continue to add on the stereotype as I move along with my stay here.

Say, did you notice a bunch of really expensive cars driving around Penang over the long weekend? Those are really sweet expensive cars apparently down in penang for some charity event. They are going around escorted by our traffic police. Most of the cars are singaporean cars.

I hate them.

Because they have escorts by police and some “marshall” on bikes, they can cut the traffic light queue, over take everywhere and not a care. Marshalls.. what are they anyway?

Worse still.. they are rich buggers. Singaporeans.. expensive cars.. malaysian police.. are our cops that cheap to hire?

They ruined my day on sunday when they overtook all of us when we were queueing near the island plaza traffic lights. Here we are all in queue and they see it fit to just ram through our turn.

So fine. They went their way and I hope I didn’t have to see them. 

But then I did see them passing another traffic light but this time they were coming perpendicular to my junction. Let them go and ruin some other people’s morning.

It was then when I turned near the youth park I noticed 3 “marshalls” dismounted from their bikes, one kapcai in the middle of the road and a man sitting by the side of the road.

You make your assumptions. I make mine.

What I have to say is, if the way they drive is not fit in singapore, why do it in Penang? Everyone knows you need a special license to drive in Penang because of the haphazard traffic. These people who are more used to the civilised singaporean driving wants to drive like a king in Penang? I will be more surprised if they survived back to singapore without a scratch in tha car!

http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/2011/10/27/so-you-want-to-be-an-engineer/

A moment of reflection after reading this article. I am begining to lose track of the years I have been working as an engineer.

The article is mostly an opinion of one person who may ba having the same feelings as I am when working too long in the same place. Questions like what is the meaning of being an engineer gets asked. Sometime we feel cheated by the government for marketing engineering and science as the best career path. When the insanity gets worse, we begin to question whether we made the right decision to take up engineering in the first place, perhas we could have been better being a photographer.

Oh, I have a fair share of friends who are engineer photographers. I also have a fair share of friends who are NOT in engineering now, despite starting off as engineers. Which proves a point about engineering, you can be anything you want if you started off as engineers. The world is mad up of cogs and gears, one way or another, engineers can figure it out.

Most disturbing statements in the article is from the comments, some saying that we should have studied arts and be managers. Or sales guys who are “bosses” to engineers because they tell them what to do.

Let me address the people’s comment. Yes, sales people determine what the engineers. Makes sense here because it is called “requirement”. You want to make sure you make a product that will sell. I have live with that for a long time, to a point that we are actively asking sales / marketing what they wanted.

But here is the thing about this relationship. You see is as “they are the boss”. I see it as a symbiosis between engineers and sales / marketing. Remember that sales and marketing are paid mostly by commission. What if the engineer does not want to follow the requirement of the sales / marketing – customer? What if the customer says he wants an additional interface for the program so that the boss can monitor everyone’s work? You hate it.. but you do it anyway.. cause otherwise no one makes money. Sales don’t make money, marketing got nothing to sell and you lose your job cause your company tutup kedai

My personal experience – I had the easy option of taking a non-engineering masters degree. Something like MBA, make a lot of money after that. But nope, I decided that I will take an engineering masters and suffer for it. I suffer both technically and I have to rudely fire back some old relatives who thinks that MBA is the way to go. I find myself having to justify my decision to go for engineers masters so much that I am turning defensive.

I just tell people when they asked that if everyone can get an MBA now. Some tom dick and harry from the factory can go and sign up for some MBA offered by many universities and colleges. How many can you find doing engineering masters?

If anything, remember that engineers loves to build things. We don’t get rich – you join marketing and sales for that. maybe it is self gloating but engineers live in another plane of existence where as long as we have enough to live, we are happy doing the work that we do.

The US is also now trying to encourage more engineers. Too many finance people screwing up the system that they set up.

To me – engineering was my choice.. destiny did not decide that I become engineer. I had other options, I did better in biology then physics / math. But at the end of the day, I think engineering is a cool career path. I took that step and never looked back since.

This came as just a thought when I was in UK a couple of weeks ago. I walked to the university everyday from the hotel, it is a half hour walk. The long walk, cool air (well it was a heatwave when I went but still considered cool when compared to Malaysia) gave me a lot of time to ponder. It helps when the walk passes through old buildings, parks and historical churches. The senses and emotion was high during those walks. When classes was over, I had to make that walk at night, after the sun has come down. The street lit by those lamp are just so “England”.

During those walks, I kept building the thought that this place is not bad. People are nice, weather is fantastic and generally the place is fantastic. I am referring to the restaurants, fish and chips, TESCO sandwiches etc. All just great.

It is all positive feeling, all feel good. I consider myself as a very positive person therefore I always try to think of good things.

But when I had the chance to talk to my classmates, who are local to the area, they start to “question” my feelings. Are you sure this is good feeling? there are so many things wrong in this place. The government sucks (by the way, everyone complains about the government at some point). Well after that, I had a thought about it again and maybe they are right. As much as I see the good points, there are a lot of wrongs in the society, here and there. I think I just choose to ignore the bad things and think of the flowers and fresh air.

So to cut the story short, what I learn is to STOP READING NEWSPAPERS! Especially the local ones where it is all about the bad things happening in the country. Even good news turns bad. I kinda stopped reading newspapers for 6 months now. I used to surf TheStar everyday but now I don’t bother. You know what, without any hard evidence, I can say that my wellbeing is better now. I really do feel less stress, less anger and more in control of my emotions. I guess no news is good news.

Having attended some of the management classes in the past few months, I now appreciate better how the first 90 days of taking office can make and break a management career. My name card still reads “engineer”, so quit talking to me about management. I was coerced to attend the management classes.

With the recent articles about Koh Tso Khoon vs Lim Guan Eng, I can add my 2 cents on why the new Chief Minister is having so much more support than the previous one. It all boils down to the first 90 days (or so).

From my point of view, the new chief minister did 2 things right. He created a vision that the people of Penang can associate. His CAT ( ) motto hits well with the people, especially after the negative perception of the existing government. The people want opposite of what they already had (whether it is for good or bad). So the first think LGE did right was to create a vision.

Next, we went for the easy win as soon as he can. Although some call it is fiasco and disaster, he was able to “handle” the Kampung Buah Pala issue. Not everyone was happy but at least the villagers had something and the developer gets to build their apartment. Win-Win if you ask me. Everyone agrees, the RM100 for every senior citizen is a fantastic idea. RM100 does not mean a lot to most of those receiving but the fact is that they GOT something. Most of them remembers paying for taxes but never getting cold hard cash from the government. It is sending them a message that the government is doing something for them and it is something that they can see, feel and spend.

The in-thing in the office these days is software process. Somehow, engineers who were previously passionate on making good products are now talking and presenting process. The most interesting that I have heard recently is a discussion on how many lines of codes should a function have. We spent 1/2 hour on it as a team and no exact answer came out from it. I say we should have gone for lunch earlier.

I got no beef with process if it makes sense or if the process makes life easier for me and everyone. I don’t mind making tons of documents if it does really help with work.

My problem with process is when someone proposes something because it is “industry standard”. It is as if there is a GOD out there called “industry standard” which would invoke fear when summoned.

My beef with this “industry standard”, is that it is a very vague data, it all depends on what you pick. Take the example above, if you show me a standard that says 100 lines per function is the “industry standard”, I can probably find some obscure research paper out there saying 1000 lines of code is optimum. The discussion will never end.

My solution is to give a good user case / application case whereby the process improvement makes sense. Instead of saying NO to >100 lines per function, say that if you have >100 lines, extra tests are needed etc.

Maybe it is right that all the smart engineers have left for the financial sector, making bog bucks for the banks writing their software. Why am I left here?